When the world is busy in conserving every drop of water through various ways fearing scarcity of the natural resource in future, a Bengaluru-based scientist has invented a technology which can produce drinking water from clouds and can extract clean water even from water available in the air around.
Invented by Dr Rajah Vijay Kumar, Chief Scientific Officer at the De Scalene Research Organization, the patented technology called as 'Rain Tunnel Technology' will be available for commercial use in next two months.
"So far we have designed and readied for production of a household 'Rain Tunnel' machine that can produce 30 litres of clean drinking water for a family. This is a standalone plug-and-play machine that can be simply plugged in to any power outlet and you have 24 hours of drinking water. It comes with a built-in dispenser providing chilled water at 8 degrees, hot water at 90 degrees and water at room temperature with cost of only 87 paisa per litre," said Dr Kumar.
The Rain Tunnel Technology is a highly efficient, low power thus low cost natural process in making drinking water. Application of Rain Tunnel Technology can range from household drinking water needs to community drinking water, public drinking water, railways, airports, emergency and disaster management, defense application, to name a few. The device is also compatible to renewable energy sources like solar, wind or biomass.
"When used with these, the cost per litre will come down drastically. As a part of our scale-up process, the Rain Tunnel Technology was successfully applied to produce 100, 500 and 1000 litres of water per day. We are in the process of building a 10,000 litre per day Rain Tunnel system, to produce about 3.6 million litres of clean drinking water per annum for a community or even farming. When running with utility supply, the average cost of water will be about 67 paise," he said.
A device in the technology called as Hypersonic Precipitator uses extremely high frequency sound waves in the range of many million cycles per second to produce nano-water particles, smaller than 20 nanometers. The invisible water particles at this nanometer size can freeze at temperatures as high as 10 - 15 degree Centigrade under specific conditions created inside the chamber, that leads to rapid growth of nanometer ice crystals by vapor deposition at the cost of very small amount of water from the cloud that has formed inside the chamber, precipitation starts and raining begins inside the Active Cloud Chamber of the Rain Tunnel. The rain is collected in a food grade tank and treated with a five stage process only when you are ready to drink. Water is never treated and stored as stagnant water can get contaminated.
Water from atmosphere is not new. It has been around for more than 500 years but as journalists say, has never been successful. All the techniques used till now was based on condensing the air to extract the moisture out and this amounts to chilling the air to very low temperature which required very high energy and would work only if the humidity is quite high like 65 to 70%, and would not work in cities like Bangalore, which has an average relative humidity of 57%.
The Rain Tunnel Technology works on the principle of creating clouds and seeding it with Hypersonic precipitation to form rain in a tunnel just like how it happens in nature. The atmosphere inside the Rain Tunnel is created for formation of rain, without involving very low temperatures. Rain Tunnel's performance depends on the atmospheric water vapor pressure, temperature, altitude and wind flow/velocity etc, and not humidity. There is an on-Board computer that controls the complex operation of creating the right weather conditions inside the chambers. Because of this the Rain Tunnel can produce water even with 10 ppm (parts per million) of water present in the air around us. That is why it needs less energy and more efficient and works in places like Bangalore. So the process in Rain Tunnel is entirely different from anything available anywhere.
About Chairman and Chief Scientist Dr Rajah Vijay Kumar
Rajah Vijay Kumar, 49, is a Bachelor of Science majoring in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, a post graduate in Microelectronics and a Doctor of Science in Medical Engineering (magna cum laude), and also holds a Master of Business Administration in Corporate Crisis Management. He is a pioneering researcher and an opinion leader in the field of Biophysics, Radiobiology, Nanotechnology and Sustainable Energy. Specialised in Electronics and Medical Engineering, he has worked for more than twenty years on regenerative tissue engineering and high speed biological data acquisition, modelling and simulation of the human cardiovascular system, artificial intelligence and neural networks in medical diagnosis and engineering. Among the many patents held by him include the Realistic Geometry Cartographic Imaging (RGCI) which finds applications from medical science to tsunami detection, and the Cytotron which is considered an important milestone in radiobiology and tissue engineering. His work on Nanotechnology has sparked off a new technique in selective tissue destruction with a 'nanoblaster' that is undergoing laboratory trials. He is also the Inventor of SPARSE fuel enrichment technology, the Fluid Ignition Engine (FIT), the TMD reactor for high intensity megasonic breakdown of long chain hydrocarbons and Transcutaneous Thermoelectroporic Omnimolicular drug delivery system, to name a few. He is a chronic Inventor with more than fifteen patents to his credit. He has many publications both in medical and engineering journals of repute. He is also the author of the book Cytonics - a mystery of the living cell.
He is the member of the United Inventors Association (UIAUS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and its Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), the Fellow of United Writer's Association (UWA), the Member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Genetic Society of America (GSA). He is the Group Chairman of Organization de Scalene, Director and Chief Scientific officer of the Centre for Advanced Research and Development (CARD), Director of Scalene Energy Research Institute (SERI) and Managing Director of Scalene Cybernetics limited and currently serves as Chairman of the board of Directors for over eight global organizations. He lives in Bangalore; he is married with three daughters.
